A lot of people got caught out by Eleanor Williams, the serial false rape accuser from Cumbria. Over a period of several years Williams accused random men, men who in some cases had had only fleeting and public contact with her, of rape and sexual assault. These false accusations had the affect that one man was remanded in custody accused of a rape that he did not carry out and another was subjected to onerous bail conditions for a similar reason.
She then decided to focus her attention seeking behaviour on exploiting the very real fears of Islamic Rape Gangs and the historical scandal of police forces ignoring these criminals in order to give the police an easier life. She smeared several men of Asian heritage as rapists and played a major part via social media in whipping up mobs against these men with the mobs carrying out acts of vandalism against these men’s property.
Williams must be a pretty accomplished liar to have taken in so many. She convinced those in her locality, as well as counterjihad campaigners such as Tommy Robinson and a former police officer who has played a major part in exposing both the rape gangs and the poor response to them by police. She also fooled me into taking her claims seriously as her claims were at the time backed up by those with gravitas in both the worlds of policing and campaigning for the rights of women and girls. Looking from the outside in and against a background of increasingly common Islamic Rape Gang scandals and police failing to take action against them or targetting the survivors for arrest or harassment, as was the case with one of the survivors of the Telford Islamic Rape Gang scandal, this case looked like so many other real cases. On a balance of probabilities basis this case looked genuine and on that I was wrong. I along with others with bigger presences and better knowledge got played by a skilled and morally empty liar. However as Ella Whelan said in a recent article for Spiked magazine a lot of people, some like Maggie Oliver the former police officer who is a specialist in this area, also got it wrong.
Ms Whelan said:
Maggie Oliver, a former detective constable with the Greater Manchester Police, also shared Williams’ claims on social media. Oliver was a key police whistleblower during the Rochdale grooming-gangs scandal. A few weeks after Williams’ viral post, local police announced that they had found no evidence of grooming-gang activity in Barrow. In response, Oliver tweeted: ‘Over the past three days I have spoken to family, friends, professionals. Every single one has told me they believe all the victims.’
Oliver’s bias is perhaps understandable, given her experience tackling the scourge of grooming gangs. She has been involved with women who were genuine victims of abuse and who were shamefully ignored by police officers who were terrified of being called racist, given grooming gangs are overwhelmingly made up of Pakistani-Muslim men. No doubt the police’s past failure to protect the victims of grooming gangs played into many other people’s willingness to believe Williams.
I believe that a combination of a collective memory of police failure along with backing of Williams’s story from Ms Oliver convinced a lot of people, it was Ms Oliver’s backing for Williams that played a major part in why I accepted the story told by Williams as being likely true. We do have rape gangs primarily made up of Muslims, this problem has been going on for decades most likely since the 1970’s, there have been police who have done little to stop the Islamic Rape Gang problem and we have had local authorities and left-dominated entities going out of their way to either hide this problem or deny its existence. This case did look like so many other genuine ones.
Ms Whelan is correct when she says that this case is what happens when there is a cultural and political push to ‘believe all women’. Women are human. Women lie just as men do. There are, as Ms Whelan points out, few cases of women falsely crying rape when that isn’t the case. But these cases exist. Some women either because of a desire to seek attention or get revenge on someone or even to get back at someone who had pissed them off, make false allegations of sexual assault or rape. As a court reporter I sat in on a number of rape cases and although it was horrible to see the complainant being strongly cross examined by the defendant’s counsel, such tactics are sadly necessary as whether or not a person tells the truth or not is down the the nature of their character and not what genitals they have.
I wonder if this liar would have been able to get away with what she did with regards to her false allegations about an Islamic Rape Gang in operation in Barrow if the public had known about her earlier attempts to smear men with false allegations? This is one of the downsides of rape complainants having lifelong anonymity as although anonymity is generally good for complainants and those who have seen their assailants convicted, it does mean that in cases like that of Williams, nobody outside of the police or her immediate circle would have been aware of her history of making false allegations. This lack of an ability to connect her false allegations of Islamic Rape Gang activity with previous similar conduct by Williams meant that the false rape gang allegations were being seen by almost everybody as coming from out of the blue.
The sentence given to Williams is very justifiable bearing in mind she ended up setting mobs on people. The only downside is that she will probably only serve a half to two thirds of it. She’s fooled a great number of people who should not have been fooled, including regretfully myself. As Ms Whelan said, ‘Believe All Women’ has turned out to be an utterly wrong way to think because women lie too and sometimes not just about little things such as how their partner dresses or not showing offence when they’ve been offended, but things such as fake sexual crime allegations, actions that can have potentially very damaging or even deadly consequences.
